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Michelle Obama will be in town tomorrow to campaign for her husband, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, and her plans include a roundtable discussion with a group of military spouses.

The invitation-only roundtable discussion will happen at Old Dominion University, according to a release from the Obama campaign. Vietnam War veteran and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Capt. Paul Bucha will be at the roundtable discussion. Bucha also is the former president of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.

Paul Bucha is a big Obama supporter. Zer-o was too busy to meet with the troops at Fort Hood (on vacation in Hawaii) so he sends her to talk to an invitation only group. What a laugh.

The invitation-only thing sounds like a PR stunt. And to send Michelle? That part I don't get.

I think Obama knows that he has dropped a load in his britches; so, what the point? He will get most of the black vote and whites will vote overwhelmingly for McCain. I don't think there are that many independents or undecided in the military community.

From NBC/NJ’s Carrie Dann
NORFOLK, Va. -- In the midst of a blistering exchange of ads between the two presidential candidates, Michelle Obama chose not to mention her husband's opponent today, even during discussion of a major policy difference with vivid resonance in the military community.

Continuing a series of roundtable discussions with military spouses, Michelle Obama called for a brighter spotlight on the needs of veterans, including post-deployment health care and education services for service members. Appearing in battleground state Virginia, Obama listened to a panel of women who lamented the unique challenges that face the husbands and wives of soldiers.

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt....

Jason Fortuny might be the closest thing this movement of anonymous provocateurs has to a spokesman. Thirty-two years old, he works “typical Clark Kent I.T.” freelance jobs — Web design, programming — but his passion is trolling, “pushing peoples’ buttons.” Fortuny frames his acts of trolling as “experiments,” sociological inquiries into human behavior. In the fall of 2006, he posted a hoax ad on Craigslist, posing as a woman seeking a “str8 brutal dom muscular male.” More than 100 men responded. Fortuny posted their names, pictures, e-mail and phone numbers to his blog, dubbing the exposé “the Craigslist Experiment.” This made Fortuny the most prominent Internet villain in America until November 2007, when his fame was eclipsed by the Megan Meier MySpace suicide. Meier, a 13-year-old Missouri girl, hanged herself with a belt after receiving cruel messages from a boy she’d been flirting with on MySpace. The boy was not a real boy, investigators say, but the fictional creation of Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan’s former friends. Drew later said she hoped to find out whether Megan was gossiping about her daughter. The story — respectable suburban wife uses Internet to torment teenage girl — was a media sensation.

Fortuny’s Craigslist Experiment deprived its subjects of more than just privacy. Two of them, he says, lost their jobs, and at least one, for a time, lost his girlfriend. Another has filed an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Fortuny in an Illinois court. After receiving death threats, Fortuny meticulously scrubbed his real address and phone number from the Internet. “Anyone who knows who and where you are is a security hole,” he told me. “I own a gun. I have an escape route. If someone comes, I’m ready.”....